You need to retrieve your December Statement from the previous tax year, for this brokerage account.

(ex.: If creating a 2012 data file, you need your December 2011 Statement)

From this statement look at the section reporting 'Holdings as of December 31.' Here your broker reports what was open and settled at year end which carries forward to the next year. Before entering these holdings as baseline positions carefully read all of the following points of this numbered list.

Next find the section 'Trades Pending Settlement.' TradeLog records transactions based on trade date as required by the IRS. If there are trades in the prior tax year that are pending settlement, you must account for these in your baseline positions.

Look to our tax topic: Baseline Positions under the section, "Unsettled trades affect your open positions" for more information.

Now that you have identified your baseline positions, you will need the original purchase date and price paid in order to enter them into TradeLog.

Notice that the price and date that is provided on the December statement is typically the fair market value of these shares as of December 31. The IRS requires that the true cost basis data be recorded. Therefore, you need to back track through your monthly statements to find when you purchased the shares and how much you paid for them.

Once you have determined your baseline positions you can proceed with entering the positions into TradeLog.

Note: If you have wash sales that were deferred in the previous tax year you will want to account for these with your baseline positions as well. See our topic on, Manually Entering a Wash Sale Deferral for more information.

Select the brokerage account you will be entering baseline positions for by selecting the appropriate Account Tab. All trade editing must be done in the individual account tabs on multi-account files.

Click Add, Enter Baseline Positions or F7 on your keyboard

Notice Tradelog has created a blank record for manual entry. This is where you enter the baseline information that you have looked up in your statement.

Enter a Date

Two digit month and day, and a four digit year (ex. 12/28/2011).

Separators must be forward slashes ("/") and are automatically generated as the complete date is typed.. Alpha-numeric date formats are not acceptable (ex. March 11, 2009).

Enter O

O/C stands for Open/Close. Since you are putting in open positions, you will use only O.

Enter L or S

L/S stands for Long/Short. Here you will specify whether you bought to open or sold to open. If you bought to open shares/contracts then you will use L for Long. If you shorted shares/contracts, sold to open, then you will use S for Short

Enter the Ticker symbol

This is the NYSE symbol of the company being traded. Make sure when entering multiple records for the same security that the ticker symbols are identical. TradeLog cannot match two records with different tickers - even if they vary due to one special character (ex. %, &, -, /) or a space.

Mutual Funds - are generally entered as a five character alpha symbol, (ex. AAPIX)

Options - need to be in the following format: Ticker symbol, expiration day, three character expiration month, expiration year, strike price, & whether it is a CALL or PUT.